One major weakness with Ansible's "lookup" plugins is that they are
evaluated _every single time they are used_, even indirectly. This
means, for example, a shell command could be run many times, potentially
resulting in different values, or executing a complex calculation that
always provides the same result. Ansible does not have a built-in way
to cache the result of a `lookup` or `query` call, so I created this
one. It's inspired by [ansible-cached-lookup][0], which didn't actually
work and is apparently unmaintained. Instead of using a hard-coded
file-based caching system, however, my plugin uses Ansible's
configuration and plugin infrastructure to store values with any
available cache plugin.
Although looking up the _pyrocufflink.net_ wildcard certificate with the
Kubernetes API isn't particularly expensive by itself right now, I can
envision several other uses that may be. Having this plugin available
could speed up future playbooks.
[0]: https://pypi.org/project/ansible-cached-lookup
Dustin C. Hatch
b9a046c7f4